Principal Investigator Manolis Kellis (Kamvysselis)
We have pioneered new computational methods for discovering biological DNA signals, and used these to analyze four related species of yeast with unprecedented success. This work led to (1) the most complete re-annotation of the yeast genome, with changes affecting more than 15% of genes, (2) the first systematic de-novo discovery of the regulatory motifs that govern gene expression, without requiring prior experimentation or biological knowledge, and (3) the first global view of eukaryotic genome evolution across multiple species.
More recently, we have applied similar methods to the comparative analysis of human, mouse, rat, and dog genomes. We showed that most previously known human transcription factor binding sites can be discovered solely on the basis of their genome-wide conservation. The work also led to the first systematic study of post-transcriptional regulatory motifs in human, including the discovery of many novel micro RNA genes.